The Unseen Voice

A Cultural Study of Early Australian Radio

Lesley Johnson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2016
• eBook ISBN: 9781315457239
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Images of the golden age of wireless and family life before the age of television have widespread currency. Their dominance raises fundamental questions about the extent to which people's memories of early radio and everyday pre-war life are shaped and mediated by these public histories. For geographical reasons radio has played an unusually important part in twentieth-century Australian life and culture. Australian radio must therefore stand as a major example in the study of the medium. This book, first published in 1988, examines the early history of Australian radio, looking at the beginnings of radio itself and at the ways in which cultural tasks were determined for it. This is a detailed analysis of radio discourse and the construction of audiences, drawing on a range of theoretical material to examine questions about the production and dynamics of popular culture, the relationship between politics and everyday life, and the changes brought about in women's lives.

1
A Gift of Science

Wireless was a wonder. Celebrated as a new science for the universal benefit of humanity, broadcasting officially began in Australia in September 1923. The magic, the marvel, the romance, and most frequently, the wonder of wireless were the terms in which the commercial beginnings of this culture industry were hailed. For the first few years this rhetoric was to dominate popular and official declamations about radio. It was claimed to be part of the exciting new age of modern electricity through whose bounty the everyday lives of the entire population would be made radiant. Opening the 1923 Radio and Electrical Exhibition in Sydney Town Hall, Dr Earle Page, the acting Prime Minister, was widely quoted as proclaiming ‘the wonders of wireless’ and expressing the belief that soon there would be ‘wireless for all’.¹

Popular science versus a domestic commodity

This language of excitement and wonder resembled in part a circus ringmaster announcing a thrilling new act. Audiences were shown the marvels of the new radio science at exhibition concerts or demonstration performances at the yearly electrical exhibitions. Newspapers and magazines kept their readers informed of recent advances, in Australia and overseas, of the successful transmission of concert performances from hundreds of miles away or of the new miracles of beam wireless. Wireless was a stunning trick: “‘Broadcast music” is by way of being a simple and intelligible label for a magic as marvellous as any that could be imagined.’²

Yet this language also reflected the way in which wireless did function as a popular science in 1923. The images of excitement and wonder that surrounded wireless at this time were more than a publicity stunt for this new commodity: they celebrated the involvement of a broad range of people in its development and exploration as a new technology. Before the official beginnings of broadcasting, experimenters, or ‘amateurs’ as they were later called, were an exclusive group. Experimenting with wireless transmission and reception required considerable financial outlay for equipment not yet mass-produced and these activities were also heavily restricted by the Postmaster General’s (PMG) department.³

But in the early 1920s experimenters began to multiply. ‘Wireless enthusiasts’ built their own sets as wireless equipment parts began to be cheaper; they experimented with their equipment in the pursuit of better reception, and amateur clubs flourished. By the time broadcasting was established officially in September 1923, there were thirty-seven amateur clubs in New South Wales (NSW), with members exchanging information about set construction, exploring together the technical possibilities of wireless and logging the reception of amateur transmissions.

New radio journals and regular columns in the daily newspapers catered for and promoted this popular science. They provided endless information on the construction of crystal and valve sets and suggestions about how to improve reception. The Daily Telegraph, in its ‘Radio Bureau’ column, declared its intention ‘to educate the public into understanding exactly what all this “wireless” and “radio” means’.⁴ When the Labor Daily introduced a weekly section on how to make your own wireless set in 1924, queues formed outside distributing agents’ shops and the paper quickly sold out. The same paper informed readers of‘a remarkable lad of 13, who has made a wireless crystal receiving set capable of cutting out unwanted stations and tuning in – completely contained in a match box’.⁵ What was later to be depicted as predominantly the preserve of small boys – participation in the exciting developments of the science of wireless – was here portrayed as firing the imagination of everyone.

For many, however, it would be the imagination only that was fired. Although sets like that of the ‘remarkable lad of 13’ could be constructed for as little as two shillings, licence fees in Australia were prohibitive, thus limiting popular participation in the excitement surrounding this new technology. Broadcasting was officially introduced in 1923 under a sealed set scheme so that listeners had to pay for the station or stations to which they wished to listen. The wavelengths assigned to each station licensed by the PMG were treated as ‘its own property for the purpose of providing its own service’,⁶ or in the words of the PMG, W.G. Gibson, ‘a limited number of stations will be permitted to broadcast in each centre, and … dealers will be able to supply receivers which will respond to the particular wavelength of each broadcasting station’.⁷

The licence fee to listen-in was an initial ten shillings per year to the PMG and broadcasting station licensees made their own charges in addition: these ranged from ten shillings a year for 2SB Sydney (later to become 2BL) to four guineas for 6WF Perth. Gibson envisaged broadcasting, not as a popular science, but as a ‘competitive entertainment business’ for which broadcasters (with the assistance of the government) should collect revenue for the maintenance of their stations and the provision of programmes.⁸ This scheme devised by E.T. Fisk of Amalgamated Wireless (Australasia) Ltd (AWA) was, as Counihan suggests, effectively an attempt to set up a ticket box for listeners-in.⁹

With the introduction of this scheme, interest in radio slumped. The excitement and anticipation that newspapers and other popular publications had built up before September 1923 was not reflected in the number of licences taken out: in the period 1 August 1923 to 30 June 1924 only 1400 listeners were licensed. Traders protested bitterly, insisting that ‘all the romance has been taken out of the wireless for the ordinary man’.¹⁰ The scheme was denounced as a fiasco¹¹ and in July 1924 the PMG announced a new scheme:

There will be two types of broadcasting licences. One will be for class ‘A’ stations, which will obtain revenue from licence fees, and the other for class ‘B’ stations, which will not receive any revenue from that source. Both types of stations will be allowed to broadcast advertisements, but class ‘A’ stations will be permitted to broadcast advertisements only for limited periods.¹²

Listeners now only paid one fee; and where there was more than one ‘A’ station in the state, licence fees were to be distributed by the government on a proportional basis: 70 per cent to one station, 30 per cent to the other.

But the licence fee remained prohibitive for many: thirty-five shillings per year. Though the ‘open set’ scheme was welcomed universally as preventing a monopoly of broadcasting by commercial interests, and as recognizing that broadcasting was a public utility, by October 1924 some dissenting voices could be heard. While newspapers such as the Age declared that the increase in wireless sales sought by traders would now depend on listening-in becoming a delight,¹³ the Labor Daily began a campaign to abolish radio licences altogether. When Gibson had met with the wireless traders in April to devise a new licence scheme, this paper had greeted the new scheme as recognizing and serving the best interests of the public.¹⁴ Now it attacked licences as providing enormous revenue to these ‘advertising stunt firms’: in NSW, Farmer and Co., who ran the ‘A’ station 2FC, and Broadcasters who ran the ‘A’ station 2BL. The federal government, declared the Labor Daily, ‘should make listening-in either free or so cheap that every worker, in country or city, could receive from radio all that radio can contribute to the enjoyment, instruction, and education of mankind.’¹⁵ This editorial, entitled ‘Wireless for Workers’, drew attention to the licence fee of only ten shillings in Britain. The expense of the licence fee in Australia, the editorial argued, restricted popular participation in the excitement of radio.

By 1924-5 crystal sets, including earphones, were advertised by department stores, such as Mark Foys in Sydney, for fifty-five shillings (when a yearly subscription to the Labor Daily cost thirty-two shillings), and they could be made far more cheaply. Valve sets, on the other hand, were being advertised for prices ranging from seven pounds to seventy-five pounds. These sets were a luxury item in the first years of broadcasting in Australia; the PMG noted in 1926 that only 20-30 per cent of listeners possessed valve sets.¹⁶ But as a letter to the Daily Telegraph pointed out, the licence fee of thirty-five shillings applied equally to owners of all types of sets.¹⁷ Though the number of licences soared in the first two years of the ‘open set’ scheme (by July 1926 there were 118,000 licences), owning a valve set and a licence was beyond most members of the population. But, for many, the cost of the licence itself continued to make radio a luxury they could not afford.

Despite this restriction on widespread participation in the excitement of wireless, official statements, advertisements for wireless equipment, newspapers, and the new radio journals insisted upon its democratic nature. Broadcasting’s potential for popular participation in the exploration and development of its science was co-opted to promote sales of wireless equipment. Wireless was the concern of‘the man in the street’, of‘everyman’. The first issue of the magazine Radio in Australia and New Zealand declared that ‘the future of Wireless lies with “The Man in the Street”’.¹⁸ The title of the Daily Telegraph’s regular column, ‘Wireless for AH’, begun in October 1924, echoed Earle Page’s speech of 1923. In 1926 this same paper instituted a radio supplement that became ‘Radio for Everybody’ in early 1927 (before being dropped later that year). And in 1927 advertisements appeared in the daily newspapers for an ‘Everyman’ receiver. Hailed as participants in the exciting new world of electricity and modern technology, this language addressed potential listeners-in and purchasers of wireless equipment not as a particular section of the population, but as ‘everybody’, you and me. Science was now accessible to all and a benefactor of all.

This was the image of science being exploited by publicity statements for radio, yet the actual involvement in the technology of wireless by listeners-in was shrinking, discouraged in particular by the new equipment being manufactured. Increasingly sets were designed as household furniture, with an emphasis on the simplicity of their operation rather than the need for technical intervention by listeners. Though the technical sections in radio magazines would remain important until the late 1920s, by 1925 the image of broadcasting as a popular science had become more what Stuart Ewen calls a cultural allegory than a reality.¹⁹ Radio came to stand for modernity and universal progress. It symbolized the bounties of industrial capitalism with its endless production of new and existing commodities freely available to all in the marketplace. Wireless equipment was produced by a magical science for the benefit of all.

The profitable industry being established behind this market rhetoric was selling a tale about itself and its goods through images of modernity and progress. This allegory of wireless as democratic science did not include as participants the many workers employed by firms like AWA.²⁰

Science itself became the producer in the guise of ‘electricity’, the experimenters of the past, or, in the mid-1930s, as the mysterious scientists ‘behind closed doors’ of the advertisements for ‘Bandmaster. A micro-sensitive radio’.²¹ Science was something to marvel at, to wonder at, but increasingly to leave to others. New innovations in the domestic apparatuses available in the marketplace now represented change, progress and the advancement of civilization: ‘The latest marvel in the radio world is the 4 valve set, which is operated without aerial or earth wire. … One of the great factors is the simplicity of tuning.’²² Publicity for the 1926 Radio and Electrical Exhibition in Sydney Town Hall advertised that visitors would be ‘initiated into all the wonders of radio, and may see all the latest of the most wonderful apparatuses which the experts have to offer’.²³ At first the science of radio had symbolized the progress of civilization in appearing to open its doors to democratic participation. Now it became a sign or symbol of progress because of its endless munificence. Wireless for Everyman. And assuring this unbounded potential of science to bestow new pleasures on the world, whispers of the coming of television – wireless with pictures – were being heard in 1924 in the popular-style radio magazines and newspapers. Radio was one sign among many of the progressive, consumer orientation of western society.²⁴

Radio and electrical exhibitions in this period conducted the most concerted campaigns to sell radio equipment through these images of science. Advertised as festivals for the general public to come and marvel at the new inventions of electricity, they were designed as massive promotion campaigns for electrical goods. Radio traders displayed their goods and demonstrated the capacities of their equipment. By 1933 broadcasting stations were setting up model studios as part of these exhibitions and conducting broadcast sessions on stage. To promote the sale of wireless equipment the exhibitions constantly found new strategies to enthrall the public.

Raymond Williams, in the British context, has drawn attention to the importance of radio traders and commercial interests in determining the direction of the early development of radio.²⁵ These interests had the most to gain by wireless being accepted as a piece of domestic equipment. The radio and electrical exhibitions in Australia attempted to persuade the public that every home should own at least one set. In the mid-1920s they exploited the image of a democratic science to attract prospective buyers, but the inclusion of radio in these exhibitions also ensured that it would be seen as part of an expanding manufacturing industry supplying electrical consumer goods for a domestic market.

Thus the major investment in radio at the outset was in the means of distribution, the domestic receivers, rather than in the content, the material to be heard on radio. This feature of the early development of radio is also reflected in the type of broadcasting stations established. A number of these were set up by radio traders as a means of advertising their companies and making the purchase of radio equipment attractive -by providing a service for their customers. Stations 2UE Sydney, 2UW Sydney, and 3UZ Melbourne were established for these purposes, as was the first station to go on the air in 1923,2SB Sydney.²⁶ Usually broadcasting for only a few hours a day, their programmes were basic, even crude; sometimes as primitive as a piano played by a friend. The sheer event of transmitting anything was seen as sufficient. Though wireless was sold as domestic equipment, the excitement generated by its technology was satisfied by the success of tuning in or achieving reception; consumers of radio were not yet necessarily listeners-in.

The commercial interest in radio was not confined to radio traders and electrical goods manufacturers. The large department stores quickly moved into the market. Farmer and Co. in Sydney was there from the beginning; they established a broadcasting station and began selling wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• CONTENTS
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• INTRODUCTION: RADIO AS POPULAR CULTURE
• 1 A GIFT OF SCIENCE
• 2 THE BEST SEAT IN THE HOUSE
• 3 THE INTIMATE VOICE
• 4 THE WORLD OF RADIO
• 5 EAVESDROPPING ON THE OUTSIDE WORLD
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX